Angst in Exile, January 25, 2012

 

From the introductory essay by Czeslaw Milosz, from Exiles, Photographs by Josef Koudelka .

“While writing this essay I had before my eyes Josef Koudelka’s photographs.  Let my words serve as a tribute to his art of telling stories without words.

Exile is a test of internal freedom and that freedom is terrifying.  Everything depends upon our own resources, of which we are mostly unaware and yet we make decisions assuming our strength will be sufficient.  The risk is total, not assuaged by the warmth of a collectivity where the second rate is usually tolerated, regarded as useful and even honored.  Now to win or to lose appears in a crude light, for we are alone and loneliness is a permanent affliction of exile.  Once Friedrich Nietzsche exalted the freedom of height, of loneliness, of the desert.  Freedom of exile is of that lofty sort, though it is imposed by circumstances and, therefore, deprived of bathos.  A brief formula may encapsule the outcome of that struggle with our own weakness:  exile destroys, but if it fails to destroy you, it makes you stronger.”

My friend Podo painted a landscape dedicated to the photographer Koudelka.  Because I have had difficulty in having anything to say I decided to check out Koudelka.  The pictures are wonder provoking and sometimes funny and sometimes scary;  almost always startling and arresting in some way large or small way, as in a Fellini film, as in music by Toots Thielemans, between tears and laughter.  Koudelka adds the dimension of dread, demonic shadings, demonic presence.  If there were any such thing as common happiness or joy in these pictures one feels there would be the Strange, as Harold Bloom describes the very best, the most inimitable poetry, as in the dissonance of Thelonious Monk. 

Indeed, there would be, is, the numinous, truth at a slant, the subjective, inwardness, doubly reflected indirect communication.  My  philosophical vocabulary is very limited.  But here is a proposition, a grammatical remark about art as I understand it:  

     The sense of the world must lie outside the world.  In the world everything is as it is and happens as it does happen.  In it there is no value—and if there were,  it would be of no value.

     If there is a value which is of value, it must lie outside all happening and being-so.  For all happening and being-so is accidental.

     What makes it non-accidental cannot lie in the world, for otherwise this would again be accidental.

     It must lie outside the world.                                           Ludwig Wittgenstein

So the truth of Koudelka’s pictures obviously lies outside the world.

Do we also say that of iconography?

I see the distinction between immanent and transcendental, the distinction in words, that is, but then the water gets muddy.  Do we see God in the world in beauty, truth, and goodness—is that the God of immanence?  Do we see His reflection?  Questions like that.

“The water gets muddy”—a cliché.  Sometimes I think one should remember Julia Child’s dictum about cooking:  “never apologize”.  I love some clichés and would rather use them than cast about for something original.  I should pretend I don’t know that something I like such as “like a deer caught in the headlights” is a cliché.  “Like a burglar caught by a flashlight.”  Am I too old to be playing like this?

Am I too old to live?  Those are the sort of mock bathetic remarks that come when I feel exiled from my career.  Then I feel that God is telling me:  “Well, ought you to be doing something else, something more?”  Something in addition to “hangin’ on, I just keep hangin’ on” as the Supremes sang?  Am I waiting for my lover to come back to me, even if I was sometimes second rate, even if the career was sometimes second rate.  The students were the best the parents had.  It was what I had, my pound of flesh.  Aye, therein lies the rub.  You couldn’t even believe in it when you were doing it.  “Well, at least I get paid for it, and better, way better, than what I was doing before.”  True, but then you lost it, and you did have an awful lot of problems with two of those classes, and even your good classes were only good to you and most of the students in those classes:  they would not have passed muster with the bosses.  They didn’t. 

So I passed from mock to pathetic bathetic wallowing.  It does help that I am listening to ‘Willow Weep for Me’, to shortly be followed by ‘Autumn Leaves’, both by Toots.  The antidote for self-pity is the bracing reflecting pathos of good or even weepy sentimental country music, the gruff rhythmical articulation of the blues (and I don’t care if it doesn’t make any sense, girl with the red dress on), or the wry stoical beauty of lyrical jazz.

Another antidote—endorphins from jogging.  TTFN.

I am happy now.  I insist I am happy now.

But everybody passes me now, jogging slowly but still twice as fast as I am going.  What is going on?